Seleção sexual e os riscos de extinção em paisagens fragmentadas

Abstract

Fragmented landscapes enhance the extinctions risks of species with sexual competition, because sexual and natural selection has an antagonistic relation. This is the case of dichromatic species, because their pattern of color plumage could be more conspicuous to predators and more energetic costly to be made, which requires a high diversity of resources. Thus, fragmented landscapes could enhance even more the disadvantages of these sexual selected species, because it decrease habitat quantity and availability and inhibit animal movement (i.e in the use of landscape structure conectors). Thus, we analyzed the influence of habitat amount and habitat aggregation in species diversity of dichromatic and monochromatic species, and collected data from presence/absence by focal technique, in 79 scattered trees on pastures of 8 different landscapes. Data were analyzed using GLM, GLMM and GAM and the best models showed that dichromatism (p<0,001) is a characteristic that enhances species vulnerability to fragmentation. Habitat amount is a factor that increases species diversity, but the tolerance to habitat loss for dichromatic species is lower, as the critical threshold is 35.5% of habitat amount to them, compared to 26.6% for monochromatic. Besides, dichromatism inhibits the presence of species in scattered trees on the landscape. Likewise, other landscape characteristics were important to enhance or decrease species diversity and presence. Habitat aggregation was important to species with low forest dependence, the percentage of trees in the landscape enhanced the presence of species in scattered trees and tree distance from the fragment decreased the presence of species on them. Additionally, tree height (p<0,001) increases the presence of both low and high forest dependent species and the presence of predators decrease the presence of these species on scattered trees. Wherefore, our result shows that species sexually selected, can have more extinction risks in fragmented landscape